The star of this summer blockbuster is Palm. Over the years, this once-great company lost its talent for everything but making business blunders. Pundits were predicting Palm’s passing — but then the new Palm Pre appeared.

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed. That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubinstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 16 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to out-iPhone the iPhone.

That the Pre even comes close to succeeding is astonishing. As so many awful “iPhone killers” have demonstrated, most efforts to replicate the iPhone result in hideous designed-by-committee messes.

HARDWARE The Pre is a shiny, flattened black plastic capsule, coated with a hard, glossy, scratch-resistant finish. When it’s turned off, the screen disappears completely into the smoky finish, leaving a stunning, featureless talisman. It’s exactly the right size. It’s smaller than the iPhone — half an inch shorter, though a quarter-inch thicker — and therefore more comfortable as a phone.

PRICE The Pre costs $200 after rebate, with a two-year contract. (If you buy it from Best Buy instead of a Sprint store, you get the rebate instantly, without having to mail anything.)

Sprint, Palm’s equally downtrodden co-star, offers a better deal than AT&T does for iPhone. For example, the $70-a-month plan (450 talk minutes) includes unlimited Internet and text messages; the equivalent iPhone AT&T plan includes no text messages at all. Sprint’s unlimited-everything plan costs $100 a month — $240 a year less than AT&T.

And these plans include the excellent Sprint Navigation (turn-by-turn GPS, spoken street names and all) and streaming TV shows and radio (pretty neat if you have a strong cell signal).

Still, I know what you’re thinking: Sprint? Like that’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which iPhone owners love to hate? But read on.

TYPING Unlike the iPhone, the Pre has a real keyboard. The screen slides up, revealing four rows of Thumbelina-size keys. They’re really tiny; a BlackBerry’s keyboard is Texas by comparison. Even so, the domed key shapes and sticky rubber key surfaces make it faster and less frustrating than typing on glass.

PHONE To make a call on the Pre, just pop open the keyboard and start dialing. Or just start typing — matches from your address book come up immediately. Or set up speed-dial keys.

Call audio quality is about average. The ringer, however, is too quiet; expect a lot of complaints about that.

SOFTWARE The Pre’s all-new operating system, called Web OS, is attractive, fluid and exciting. It borrows plenty from the iPhone — pinch or spread two fingers on the screen to zoom in or out, for example, or flick a list item sideways to delete it — but has its own personality.

For example, once the gorgeous screen comes to life, the black plastic strip beneath it is also touch-sensitive. Slide your thumb leftward, for example, to go back one screen. Drag upward to summon the animated, bendy, quick-launch strip. It holds the icons for the five programs you use most often (phone, calendar, e-mail) so you can switch programs without returning to a central home screen first.

That’s important, because the Pre can keep multiple programs open simultaneously. Play Internet radio while you read a PDF document, or compare two open e-mail messages — you can’t do that on the iPhone.

When you press the tiny glowing button below the screen, all open windows shrink slightly into individual “cards.” You can swap programs by tossing them around, or exit a program by flicking its card up off the screen. (Good thing that’s fun to do. If you accumulate about 10 open cards, a hostile out-of-memory message appears.)

Thoughtful grace notes are everywhere. When watching a video, you can flick right or left to skip forward or backward a few seconds. Empty time slots on your daily calendar collapse to save space, denoted by a “3 hours free” strip. When you magnify a Word document, the text reflows so that you never have to scroll horizontally.

Photo

Palm Pre is smaller than an iPhone, and just a little bit thicker.Credit
Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

BATTERY Everyone griped about the iPhone’s permanently sealed battery. The Pre’s battery, however, is easy to swap.

That’s fortunate, because battery life is the Pre’s heartbreaker. Depending on how heavily I used the thing, the battery was dead either by late afternoon or by dinnertime. Yikes.

Palm calls those unusually poor results, probably because of the miserable Sprint coverage where I live; hunting for a signal eats up power faster. (Palm rates the battery at five hours of talk time or 12 hours of music playback.) Even Palm, however, concedes that one full day is about the best you’ll get.

(For a review of the optional magnetic wireless Touchstone charging stand, see nytimes.com/pogue.)

MUSIC Most phones do a feeble job as music players. Especially compared with the iPhone itself, which, after all, is an actual iPod.

But so, apparently, is the Pre.

When you connect it to your Mac or PC, the Pre appears in Apple’s iTunes software, labeled “iPod.” You can now sync your music, photo and video collections (minus the copy-protected items). ITunes never knows the difference. Apple’s lawyers must be having conniptions.

BUILT-IN PROGRAMS You might keep your family schedule on Google Calendar, your work calendar in Exchange or Outlook and some events in Facebook. The Pre consolidates these online agendas onto a single color-coded calendar.

It does the same thing with your various online address books. You wind up with only one entry for, say, Snuffy Smith, containing all contact information from all sources. The Pre can also consolidate e-mail accounts into a single Inbox, or AIM and Google Talk buddy lists. It’s done well and it makes enormous sense.

APP STORE A big part of the iPhone’s appeal is the app store: 35,000 free or dirt-cheap downloadable programs. The Pre’s app store is starting small — there’s a New York Times reader, Pandora Internet radio, Fandango movie listings and so on.

Palm intends to approve thousands more in the coming weeks, but they won’t be as diverse or powerful as the iPhone’s (especially games). At the outset, at least, Palm is limiting programmer access to the Pre’s features.

All right, then: the Pre is a spectacular achievement. Zero to 60 in one version.

But is it an iPhone killer, as some gadget bloggers have been asking?

The Pre will be a hit, but the iPhone isn’t going away. First of all, Apple’s lead of 20 million phones will only grow when the new iPhone 3.0 software (and, presumably, a third iPhone model) come out shortly.

Second, Palm’s audience for this model is limited to the United States. It requires a CDMA network, so it works in few other countries.

Third, even the Pre has its annoyances. Opening certain programs can be very slow — sometimes eight or nine seconds — and there’s no progress bar or hourglass to let you know that it’s still working.

There’s no memory-card slot to expand the eight gigabytes of storage, and no Visual Voicemail (where messages are listed like e-mail). The ingenious universal search function (searches your programs, address book and the Web simultaneously) won’t look through your e-mail or calendars.

There are a few bugs left to exterminate, too.

Finally, the Pre is not quite as simple as the iPhone. All those extra features, by definition, mean that there’s more to learn.